Assail

by Ian C. Esslemont

  ‘I dismiss this trial as a corrupted test,’ Luthal announced.

  Shimmer continued to watch the dark wavering figure as it made its slow laborious way up the white sand slope. To one side lay the half-buried rotting hull of a wreck. Peering down, she noted a number of other such skeletal remains littering the deep lagoon bottom. ‘You mentioned no such provision in the trial,’ she answered, rather distractedly. She fought to keep a smile from pulling at her lips: why hadn’t he told her? Obviously he’d worked out some sort of solution with Gwynn, or Petal, or perhaps all the company mages combined.

  ‘It is understood,’ Luthal huffed. ‘Everyone knows this.’

  ‘Sadly, we outlanders are ignorant of such niceties. Everyone knows this.’

  Luthal peered over the side and his eyes fairly goggled at the progress the figure below was making. ‘You cannot mean to hold to such an absurd demonstration!’

  ‘I agree that your practices are absurd. But you insisted.’ The merchant adventurer appeared ready to order his crossbowmen to fire upon her. ‘Perhaps we should take the boat to shore,’ she suggested. ‘To see how the trial ends.’ Luthal snarled under his breath, but he snapped an order to the sailors and they set to lowering rope ladders to waiting launches.

  Shimmer found it uncannily odd to find herself floating over her commander’s head while he struggled below to heave his load of stones up the submerged slope. Who was aiding him? she wondered. Could it be Petal on Mael’s Greetings? Or Gwynn? Yet neither of these had ever confessed to any knowledge of Ruse magics. It certainly was not Blues here beside her, frowning down at the water, apparently as completely perplexed as she. However, it occurred to her that the Warren of High Denul, the healing and manipulation of the flesh, could also serve to sustain K’azz. And every Crimson Guard mage, out of necessity, possessed some familiarity with the healing magics of Denul. Perhaps Petal was even now completely engrossed in maintaining K’azz’s breath. This must have been what K’azz had in mind from the beginning; why the man had pressed so hard for a trial. He’d worked it out with the company mages but had not included her. She had to admit to feeling a touch put out.

  Didn’t he trust her?

  The boat ground ashore and Luthal and his escort of six guards clambered out. She and Blues followed; the guard kept a steady bead on them with their crossbows as if they would throw themselves upon Luthal. She ignored them. Together they all awaited K’azz’s arrival. Other than they, the beach was deserted. When she and Blues had headed out, Ghelath and the rest of the Avowed had returned to the Greetings, there to await the outcome of the trial – and to avoid any further fees the Letherii might invent to level upon them.

  Out of curiosity, Shimmer peered about at the so-called ‘establishment’. What immediately came to mind was an impression of general shabbiness. That, and the temporary, transient character of everything. No buildings of any sort had been erected. Canvas tents, pole-framed, stood here and there. Fire pits were in evidence everywhere. The Letherii soldiers – private hired guards, she corrected herself – lounged about in the shade of the tents, all but those manning the palisade that ran across the inland edge of the beach. The entire band appeared scruffy, ill-fed, and lacking in any discipline.

  They would prove no challenge should Shimmer choose to act.

  K’azz, however, held his company to a higher standard. No mere brigands were they to simply take what lay within their power to take. And Shimmer found that she agreed, though it galled her to have to endure the smug self-righteousness of Luthal.

  The palisade troubled her. Clearly they were not alone on the island. Who were the locals? Hostile in any case, she assumed. And the palisade itself was not built simply of logs. It was an uneven mishmash of adzed timbers and sections of what appeared to be decking and hulls of ships. The entire construction was made up of bits and pieces of salvage from many wrecks.

  She studied the rising pillar-like slopes above and noted that while grasses and low brush covered the rock, anything larger was entirely absent. Not one tree grew here – or they’d all been harvested for cooking or building. Had K’azz seen this earlier when he’d been studying the island?

  A grunt of outrage from Luthal drew her attention to the lagoon. A dot had emerged from the waves: K’azz broaching the surface. Hunched forward, the man doggedly carried on, step after laborious step. And the shifting sands couldn’t be helping.

  His shoulders emerged, each looped by the numerous ropes supporting his load of stones.

  ‘Impossible …’ Luthal murmured at Shimmer’s side. His voice, she noted, held a touch of awe. He turned to her, now scowling. ‘This is your foreign Warren-magic.’ He swept a hand down in dismissal. ‘This is illegal. You are forfeit.’

  ‘Forfeit?’ Blues snarled. ‘You set a trial. We pass it. Now you back out?’

  The crossbowmen, Shimmer saw from the corners of her eyes, were spreading out in a semicircle facing them. K’azz was now only knee-deep in the surf. With each step the stone weights hung upon him clattered and knocked as he heaved himself up the steep grade of the beach. Shimmer tried to catch his eye but his head was lowered in his struggle to stay erect.

  ‘Mistrial!’ Luthal shouted. ‘I call mistrial! Outside influence!’

  Shimmer had had enough. ‘Oh, shut the Abyss up.’ She ran down into the waves to help K’azz. Together, she and Blues half dragged their commander the rest of the way until he sank to his knees. The stones rattled and Shimmer noted the deep gouges the ropes had pressed into his shoulders. Blues had already begun cutting.

  ‘This proves nothing,’ Luthal continued, his voice rising.

  K’azz heaved himself to his feet. Shimmer was amazed to see that he was not even out of breath. He pushed back his sodden hair and studied Luthal. Shimmer knew him well enough to read the fury in his narrowed impassive gaze.

  ‘You will not honour even your own laws?’ he ground out. His voice was level but Shimmer heard the disappointment, and disgust.

  The Letherii showed only defiance, arms crossed, his expression one of arrogant superiority. ‘You did not follow the spirit of the law,’ he objected.

  Shimmer found the man’s blindness to his own hypocrisy breathtaking. Moreover, he was obviously incapable of even understanding the possibility of it.

  K’azz appeared to have reached the same conclusion as he blew out his breath and wiped the remaining water from his face. ‘Very well. Since there is no way we can ever satisfy you … we shall go.

  ‘Go? You cannot go – there remains the matter of the debt!’

  For the first time a hard edge crept into K’azz’s voice: ‘I fulfilled your trial yet I choose to forgo the hundred Peaks. Consider yourself lucky not to be the one indebted.’

  Luthal’s mouth twisted as he tasted the sourness of his position. Curtly, he waved them off. ‘Go then. Renegers. Men and women of bad faith. I cannot do business with those who refuse to honour even the most basic laws of commerce.’

  Blues drew breath to answer but K’azz wearily raised a hand for silence. Together they walked to the small skiff that Ghelath had left pulled up the shore.

  ‘They gonna shoot us from behind?’ Blues murmured to K’azz, without looking back.

  ‘I suspect not,’ K’azz answered. ‘That would precipitate a pocket war between our forces. Bad for business.’

  ‘You’ve shown some restraint yourself,’ Shimmer observed.

  K’azz nodded his tired agreement. ‘I gave the man every chance, Shimmer,’ he said. ‘Witness that. Every chance.’

  Back on board Mael’s Greetings, Shimmer immediately sought out Gwynn and Petal. She found them already together at the ship’s side. ‘How did you do it?’ she asked. They exchanged surprised, and rather alarmed, glances.

  ‘We thought …’ Petal began, ‘that is … we were just discussing how Blues could have managed …’

  ‘But he didn’t do it.’

  ‘As I said,’ Gwynn cut in, looking satisfied. ‘I detected n
o active Warren-manipulation at all.’

  ‘Yet there must have been something,’ Petal murmured. The possibility that there hadn’t been seemed to terrify him.

  They looked past her, nodding their greeting, and she turned to see the man himself flanked by Blues and a second figure: the scarecrow-tattered High Mage Cowl, wearing his usual mocking smile.

  Of course. Cowl.

  The one mage she’d forgotten. And why? Because she so very much wanted to forget the bastard. Ghelath edged his way forward through the gathered Avowed as they congratulated K’azz. ‘We can’t sail,’ he complained. ‘The moment we leave the bay we’ll wallow and capsize!’

  ‘Yes, Master Ghelath. Unship the oars. Make for the nearest Letherii vessel. It’s time to collect a down payment on my debt. Bars – organize a boarding party. Minimum bloodshed. Just throw them overboard.’

  Bars gave a savage grin and saluted. ‘’Bout goddamned time.’ K’azz caught Shimmer’s eye. ‘Every chance, Shimmer,’ he said, as if by way of apology.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’m doing them a favour, actually,’ he added, and he motioned to the island. ‘You saw the palisade? The guards?’

  She frowned, puzzled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could order their other ships sunk, yes? But I won’t. That would condemn them all to death. Seems the locals don’t want them here – and there’s no food or water on that narrow strand of shit.’

  He gave her a small smile then and turned away, heading for his cabin. Cowl remained behind and she caught his eye, beckoning him aside. When they had a modicum of privacy, she asked, her voice low, ‘How did you do it?’

  The man’s maddening, mocking grin deepened. ‘Do what?’

  She bit down on her irritation. ‘Sustain him.’

  The mage appeared to be enjoying the discussion so much he had to wrap his arms around himself. ‘I did no such thing, Shimmer.’

  ‘No?’ She did not bother to hide her confusion. ‘You didn’t? Then who …?’

  ‘No one did. That is, other than K’azz.’

  ‘K’azz? But he is no mage – is he?’

  ‘He is not.’

  ‘Then … how?’

  The man just smiled all the more. And he slowly turned away, grinning and chuckling. Shimmer wanted to strangle him. But that had been tried before: Cowl had had his throat cut and been strangled by Dancer himself. Yet he’d lived. Somehow he’d lived. Was that the secret these two shared? If so, she felt a new sensation stealing over her. She realized she no longer simply feared for her commander. She faced the closed cabin door. Now, she knew a strange new sensation: now she felt a rising dread of her commander.

  K’azz – what are you becoming?

  * * *

  Burl slept poorly after his confrontation with Gaff and the crew. Over the following nights he jerked awake at every slight creak of hull timber or tick of wood from the cabin panelling. Whellen still slept soundly, as if under some sort of spell. The crew worked quietly, subdued and watchful. It did not help that there was so little to do; the Strike hardly moved at all. Only the weakest of icy winds urged it on.

  As the days passed, Burl quit his cabin less and less. Why bother? There was nothing to see or do. And he did not like the way the crew watched him; as if these troubles were all his fault. He suspected that they were planning to throw not only Whellen overboard, but him as well for protecting the man. As the days passed, he became certain of it. He took to sitting facing the door to his cabin, sword across his lap. He even slept in the chair, jerking awake and snatching up the weapon whenever he nearly slid from his seat.

  Hunger finally drove him out. He gave the form of his still immobile First Mate one last glance, then eased open the door. Sword out, he edged out on to the mid-deck. The soft diffused light of the day made him think it was late afternoon, though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard the ship’s bell.

  To his surprise and horror he discovered the deck empty of any crew. Not one soul was in sight. He drew breath to bellow his outrage but something choked his throat, some nameless dread and suspicion: if everyone was gone then couldn’t who or what ever did it – couldn’t it – still be about?

  He hunched into a fighting crouch, sword raised, and padded onward as quietly as he could. When he edged past the mainmast some instinct, or faint rustle, made him glance upwards and he thought he caught a glimpse of movement there at the lip of the crow’s nest high atop the mast. A pulled-away dark lump against the ice-blue sky that might have been the silhouette of a head.

  He tried one leaf of the cargo hold doors but found them secured somehow from within. Strange, that. He searched the bows and found that indeed the ship was empty of all crew. He came across no sign of violence or struggle; no blood, scattered gear, or damage. Everything was secured, tied down and squared away. It was as if the crew, after taking care to ready for ship’s inspection, then piled into launches and abandoned the vessel. But that was not quite so: the two small-boats remained in their moorings.

  Gaff’s description of the ghost ship returned to him then and he shivered something clutched his throat, almost cutting off his breath. They’d found it looking clean and in order – simply empty of all souls. Gaff had even mentioned unfinished meals on the common table in the galley.

  As if everyone had merely walked away … or been taken.

  He shook his head to clear it of such fancies. This was no ghost ship. He and Whellen were here. He returned to the stern and the narrow companionway. Here he found the door to the stores closed and barred. He banged upon it.

  ‘Open up, damn you! This is Burl! The captain! I order you to open up!’

  He waited, but no one answered. He raised his fist once more but froze as he sensed someone there, listening, perhaps pressed up against their side of the door. ‘Who’s there?’ he murmured, lowering his voice. ‘Who is it? Gaff? Are you there?’

  Something shifted behind the door, cloth brushing against wood. ‘Gaff is gone,’ came a strangled whisper.

  ‘Gone? Gone where?’

  After a long silence he thought he heard a gasped, ‘Taken.’

  ‘Taken? By who, man? Who? Answer me!’ He waited, listening. Only his harsh breathing sounded in the companionway, that and the weak creaking of the timbers as the vessel coasted onward over the still waters. ‘Who?’

  A voice, speaking perhaps through choking misery, sobbed: ‘Maybe you!’ The sobbing climbed into abject weeping and someone slid down the boards of the door.

  Burl flinched away as if the man’s fit were somehow contagious.

  He climbed to the deck, perhaps hoping for open clean air, but he was not refreshed. The atmosphere was chill and dead. His breath plumed about him in a cloud. On a hunch, he started up the rigging for the crow’s nest. When he was halfway up the head reappeared above and a voice called, high and strangled: ‘I’ll jump! I swear! Come no closer!’

  Burl was angry at himself for not being able to identify the crewman, so choked with terror was the voice. Was it Juth? Or maybe Bolen? ‘That you, Bolen?’ he called.

  ‘Stop or I’ll jump!’ the voice shrieked.

  Burl halted. He raised a hand. ‘All right! I’m stopping. What is it? What’s stalking the crew?’

  The man was weeping. ‘I don’t know! Could be anyone!’ The head ducked from sight. ‘So keep away!’

  Burl cursed under his breath. Anyone? And why? What’s to gain? A lone person can’t possibly sail a damned ship. It didn’t make any sense.

  He started back down the rigging. On the deck a suspicion took him and he ducked into the cabin: Whellen still lay within. He went to the galley and collected a handful of dried biscuits then returned to the cabin, shut the door, adjusted the chair once more to face the entrance and sat, sword across his lap.

  He chewed on a biscuit and waited for whatever was stalking the crew to come for him.

  Some time later, he jerked awake at a noise – or at least he thought he heard a noise. He t
hought it sounded like a splash. He straightened on numb stiff legs and reached for the latch. Then he remembered something and stopped to look: Whellen still lay beneath his blanket. Hoar frost gleamed on the coarse wool weave. Burl clenched and unclenched his hands to warm them, then pulled open the door. The iron latch was so cold it burned his fingers.

  Again he found the deck empty. The waters of the Sea of Dread remained calm – unnaturally so. Any body of water of its size ought to have considerable waves. The sky above was darkening into twilight. Stars shone through and Burl blinked and rubbed his eyes as he gazed at them: he recognized none of the constellations. Where was the Rudder? The Cart? The Great Cowl? It was as if he were staring up at another sky.

  He spun, raising his sword: for a moment he’d been certain someone was behind him. Indeed, he still had that prickling feeling that someone was watching him. Glancing about to be sure he was alone, he sheathed the sword, then started up the rigging. This time no one challenged him. He reached the crow’s nest and peeked within: empty. Perhaps what he’d heard had been a splash. He climbed back down.

  Everywhere he checked it was the same: doors that were formerly locked and barred now hung open. None showed any sign of having been hacked or forced. The stores and armoury were empty, as was the hold. As far as he could determine Whellen and he were now the only two souls on board the Strike.

  He returned to the mid-deck.

  This time he was not alone. Another stood at the side, facing away out over the limpid waves. A familiar blanket lay draped about his shoulders: Whellen.

  So. Now it was his turn. Someone had slain the rest of all the souls on board and now only the two of them were left alive. And Burl knew it wasn’t him; he raised his weapon and advanced upon the man. ‘You’ll not find me so terrified,’ he called.